Missives
New dating show ‘Eastern Hookup’ helps spark young love at Eastern Michigan University.
Finding love in college doesn’t have to mean stolen glances at the computer lab or missives shouted over the blaring radio at a house party or even accidental collisions at Rick’s.
Now that Eastern Michigan University students have harkened back to the 1960s and paid homage to the illustrious “Dating Game” television show, students can get struck by Cupid’s arrow the old-fashioned way: blind dating on TV.
College TV, that is.
EMU students have begun taping episodes of “The Eastern Hookup,” an EMU television show where one able-bodied college student interviews three possible dates without seeing them. In the end, the bachelor or bachelorette chooses one contestant, and after she or he is revealed they go on a date.
It’s so romantic, right?
“Dating is tough, especially in a world that can seem loveless at times,” student Alex Nelson, the show’s producer, told EMU’s student newspaper the Eastern Echo in article that appeared Feb. 27. Nelson says he wants to ignite “that spark” (you know, that feeling when weak knees, fluttering butterflies and a rush of college hormones collide) because “everybody deserves a chance to find love.”
You can view the show on EMU Television’s Youtube channel. It appears that this academic year there have been two episodes, one in October and the other in November.
What kind of dating questions can you expect as students look for that special spark? “Tell me something that is very appealing in a partner?” “Are you a virgin?” “What food would you order for me on a date?”Ah, college.
Person
Person to team: jobFig.
Founded in 2011, jobFig uses the five-factor model of personality to measure compabililty between pre-existing teams and potential hires. Using jobFig, you can take the 100 people who applied to your last posting and reduce the number to those that will get along with the team–and then interview them.
Specializing in interpersonal dynamics, the Mountain View startup tracks leadership and work styles. Using their personality mapping tech, the startup can measure where there’s a leadership vacuum or a lack of implementers. If you’ve already got a leader, jobFig will filter out the leader-types so the two don’t fight like betta fish. Using their personality data crunching, the qualitative ambiguities of team cohesion grow more quantitative and actionable–similarly to the other startups in the prehire assessment space.
To cofounder Ravi Mikkelsen, it’s a positive: “Everyone in this space is competitive in that we’re all prehire assessments,” he says, “but we’re also quite complementary in that we all do something slightly different.”
Still, the challenge is in the data-collecting itself.
“In order to do better hiring, you need to have a really solid, systematic, and scientifically valid understanding of what it takes to be successful,” says Rivera, the Northwestern assistant professor. “So until you have that, you can match people to the cows come home, and I’m not confident it would actually give you better or worse hires.”
Immigration
Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew who co-wrote the analysis, said Mexican immigration may never return to its height during the mid-decade housing and construction boom, even with the U.S. economy recovering. He cited longer-term factors such as a shrinking Mexican work force.
He noted that government data now show a clear shift among Mexican workers already in the U.S. who are returning home. He said that data is a sign that many immigrants are giving up on life in the U.S., feeling squeezed by increasing enforcement and limited opportunities that they don’t see improving anytime soon.
About 1.4 million Mexicans left the U.S. between 2005 and 2010, double the number who did so a decade earlier. In the meantime, the number of Mexicans who entered the U.S. sharply fell to about 1.4 million, putting net migration from Mexico at a standstill. More recent data suggest that most of the movement is now heading back to Mexico, accounting for the drop in the illegal immigrant population.
During the same period, the population of authorized Mexican immigrants edged higher, from 5.6 million to 5.8 million.
Among the Mexican immigrants who leave the U.S., an estimated 5 to 35 percent are deported while the rest opt to go back voluntarily, often taking U.S.-born children with them. Those who were in the U.S. illegally and returned to Mexico also are increasingly saying they will not try to come back — about 20 percent, compared to 7 percent in 2005.
The Pew estimates come amid heightened attention on immigration in an election year where the fast-growing Hispanic population, now making up roughly 16 percent of the U.S. population, could play a key role. Arizona’s law, being challenged by the Obama administration in the Supreme Court, seeks to expand the authority of state police to ask about the immigration status of anybody they stop on the rationale that federal enforcement has largely failed.
Since Arizona’s law passed in 2010, five other states — Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah — have passed similar measures.